The invention relates to electronic calendar systems, and more particularly to methods for displaying and navigating calendar events in a computer system, as well as to a user interface for an electronic calendar.
Computer based calendar systems are an efficient and well established organizational tool for both business and private use. One example of a complex and powerful computer based calendar system is the Microsoft Outlook calendar, see e.g. US 2008/0244425 A1. The calendar associates events, e.g. appointments, with time, and displays a time section, usually a day, a week, or a month, on a graphical display, together with the events associated with this time section. For example, the calendar shows a number of rows, each row divided into seven days, and each day having displayed thereupon an entry or symbol for an event like an appointment or task scheduled for that day.
While the known calendar is a powerful tool, it is limited in terms of navigation and overview. Only a small section of time can be displayed at once, and the larger the section of time for display, the smaller is the space that is available to display all events. The time display is discontinuous and divided into separately depicted days or weeks. It is thus not possible to plan or display events that are spaced far away in time, say a couple of months, or visualize their time respective relationship, and due to the discontinuous nature of the display the time relation between time units is not intuitively recognizable.
It is therefore an object of the invention to overcome the drawbacks of the prior art calendars.